Free What Now? by Ann Patchett Page A

Where are you going to college? Everywhere I went I felt as if I were being hounded by my own Greek chorus, and even though all those people hound-ing me quite possibly had good intentions and were genuinely interested in my future, after a while the questions started to feel like nothing more than a relentless interroga-tion: a dark room, a single chair, a blinding light in my eyes. “I don’t KNOW!” I wanted to 6

    scream. “I don’t KNOW where I’m going to college!” What if I didn’t get accepted anywhere? Didn’t they ever think about that?
    What if I had to live at home forever and find a job waiting tables and never got the education I needed to be a writer? If the people who questioned me had any notion of the depth and the darkness of my fears, I doubt they would have had the temerity to ask me anything at all.
    But thanks to the natural order of the universe, for better or for worse, everything eventually changes. One beautiful afternoon the mailman drove off and I ran out to the box and there it was, my entire future in one slim envelope. I ripped into it right there on the lawn and read the contents again and again until I had it committed to memory. I was going to college. In that instant everything in 7

    my world was different because I had an answer for the inevitable question. In a funny way that was even more meaningful than the acceptance itself. When the aunt and the dentist and the best friend’s mother asked me where I was going, I could reply with a level of nonchalance that made it seem there was never any doubt, “College? Why, I’m going to Sarah Lawrence.”
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    Oh, I was set. My sense of time was so underdeveloped that four years sounded like a glorious eternity. I had gotten into the school that I wanted to go to and I would stay there and never have to worry about the future again. Finally I arrived on campus and lugged my suitcases up the stairs of the 8

    dreamy little house that was my dorm, put my toothbrush in my assigned toothbrush slot, and unpacked. I knew I wanted to be a writer and so I thought it best to make myself well-rounded, since that’s what a writer had to be. I flipped through the course catalog and tried to choose between marine biology and comparative religion and printmaking and economics and Shakespeare. There were so many possibilities that I felt dizzy—what if I picked the wrong one? What if I missed out on the thing I needed the most just because I didn’t know I needed it? Back then I thought that a person’s education was defined by majors and minors, and that classes set down a map that would guide the rest of my life. If I took the wrong turn now would I feel the repercussions twenty years down the road?
    How in the world was I qualified to make the 9

    decisions that would shape my future? I had thought so much about getting into college that I didn’t ever stop to consider what college might be like. All I wanted was to be able to hand the catalog over to my mother and ask her, What now?
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    I was seventeen and a long way from home, having come to New York from Tennessee. There is no way to overstate the fact that all I was in those days was terribly, terribly lonely. I don’t even know if that particular brand of loneliness exists anymore, though I suspect that new kinds have sprung up to take its place. There was no e-mail, and in those happy, bygone days only doctors and drug dealers carried cell phones. There was a pay 1 0

    phone downstairs, but it was prohibitively expensive, and anyway, there was always somebody parked on it, usually the beautiful girl from Caracas. We called her the Venezue-lan Princess, and she had enough money to talk to her family in South America for hours on end. I went back upstairs with my little sack of quarters and wrote as many letters as I had stamps. I wrote to my parents, my grandmother, and sister. I wrote to all my far-flung girlfriends from high school, but the letters